Neanderthals were among the closest relatives of modern humans, with their lineages diverging around 500,000 years ago. Although Neanderthals once ranged across Eurasia, they are usually thought to have gone extinct about 40,000 years ago.
However, DNA from Neanderthals is rare, and high-quality genomes are especially uncommon; until the new study, only four were available, three of which came from Russia, at the edge of the Neanderthals' geographic range. As such, it was uncertain whether DNA analyses of just a few Neanderthals accurately reflected why the entire lineage went extinct.
"Some people might think the retrieval of ancient DNA from Neanderthals is now conventional; the truth is that this is far from trivial," Carles Lalueza-Fox, director of the Natural Sciences Museum of Barcelona in Spain, who did not take part in this research, told Live Science. Adding 27 more Neanderthals "to our general knowledge is a remarkable achievement."
Researchers examined Neanderthal remains found in the Goyet cave system in Belgium. (Image credit: Mateja Hajdinjak)
The genetic analysis revealed the late Neanderthals of northwestern Europe separated from a common ancestor with other known Neanderthals about 54,000 years ago. The newly studied late Neanderthals were more closely related to one another than late Neanderthal groups in other parts of Europe.
A femur (thigh bone) from a Neanderthal found in Belgium. (Image credit: E. Dewamme, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, CC-BY 4.0)
"I am very happy to dispel the misconception that all Neandertals went extinct because they were too inbred," Alba Bossoms Mesa, a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and first author of the study, told Live Science.
"Neanderthals lived across vast regions of Eurasia over hundreds of thousands of years, so of course there is a lot of variation between them," Bossoms Mesa said. "It's not good to generalize about Neanderthals. We have to keep diversity in mind."
Striking asymmetry
The late Neanderthals of northwestern Europe were contemporaries of modern humans (Homo sapiens) in Europe for up to 500 generations, the researchers said. Previous research has discovered Neanderthal DNA in modern-human genomes, revealing these lineages had mingled, with most modern-day humans outside Africa possessing some Neanderthal DNA. However, the new study found no evidence of recent modern-human DNA in these Neanderthals of Belgium and France, suggesting the two groups didn't mate there.
There are several possible reasons for this asymmetry, Lalueza-Fox said. For instance, maybe there were genetic problems that prevented H. sapiens DNA from integrating with the Neanderthal gene pool. For instance, a 2025 study suggested that different versions of a gene tied to red blood cell function might have caused Neanderthal-human hybrid women to miscarry their fetuses.
Related StoriesHowever, "in my view, this conspicuous bias likely reflects a pattern of differential social acceptance among Neanderthals," he noted. "In brief, early modern humans were able to accept kids with Neanderthals but not the opposite, for whatever reason. This pattern, coupled with declining diversity in some Neanderthal populations, could explain their final extinction."
How much do you know about our closest relatives? Find out with our Neanderthal quiz!
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